Artist enshrined small moments in life on canvas

Douglas Long

Phnom Penh Post

Svay Ken’s paintings have often been described as “naive” by international critics, full of vitality in approach and subject matter, but lacking the technical skills that come with formal training.

Such categorisation has been resisted by Phnom Penh’s arts community, especially by those with a vested cultural interest in promoting Svay Ken as a unique visionary among contemporary Cambodian painters. Even critics who have tagged the painter as “raw” acknowledge that he brought a certain level of sophistication to his art, particularly in his creative, if unorthodox, use of perspective.

Svay Ken, who only started painting in 1993 at the age of 60, does seem to be one of those rare artists who benefited from lack of overexposure to the formal art world. Divorced from the desire to create work that followed any existing school of artistic thought or technique, he was liberated from the need to do anything but follow his own heart.

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